Firstly, why do they do this? And secondly, does this violate antitrust laws in a similar way that Microsoft did with IE?
The issue with IE was that Microsoft was using its monopoly in the operating system market to unfairly drive out competition in the browser market.[1] Apple, on the other hand, has only 45% of the smartphone market in the U.S. today,[2] so nobody has a monopoly in that market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
[2] https://macdailynews.com/2019/03/13/apple-grows-iphone-marke...
I just hate how Apple are holding browsers back in terms of PWA support. If they allowed Chrome or Firefox to have their own engines, we could at least have push notifs on iOS with PWAs. Not to mention the Safari bugs; to a developer, targeting Safari can sometimes feel like targeting IE in the early 2000s.